When Navajo Ranger Stanley Milford Jr and partner Jon Dover were assigned to the department for investigating paranormal activity in Arizona and Utah’s Monument Valley, the pair couldn’t believe it. “Oh my goodness, we’re going to be like The X-Files,” said Dover.
But as Milford reveals in ‘The Paranormal Ranger – A Navajo Investigator’s Search for the Unexplained’ (William Morrow), Dover’s hunch was accurate. “I never expected to go looking for ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs, extra-terrestrials, or Navajo witches,” he writes.
“[But] the cases led me to one conclusion: There’s much more to this world than we can imagine.”
The son of a Navajo father and Cherokee mother, Milford’s 11-yeat stint investigating paranormal activity within Navajo reservations defined his career. From UFO sightings in Arizona to Big Foot encounters in New Mexico’s Chuska Mountains, Milford treated each case with equal seriousness. “For those who experienced paranormal encounters, the event could be traumatizing,” he writes. “I learned to shut my mouth and open my ears.”
Some investigations followed him home. In November 2010, Milford visited offices in Window Rock, Arizona. “The employees heard disembodied voices, felt unseen hands touch them,” he writes.
Soon, Milford was targeted. “I felt an invisible finger touch my lip. It moved across my mustache, from one side to the other,” he recalls. “[Then] I heard two male voices, about three feet away. “[But] There was no one there.”
Later, a chair shot across a room, a laptop battery crashed against a wall and scores of coins rained down, all landing heads up. “The only conclusion was that a spirit was saying, “Heads up, I’m here,” he adds.
Then Milford’s cousin and fellow investigator Tony was pursued too. He found a dollar bill with ‘DIE’ scrawled on it and saw a 12-inch butcher’s knife fly across his kitchen. “The spirit was trying to send a message,” writes Milford. “If it wanted to hurt us, it could.”
Today, Milford no longer doubts there are powers beyond our comprehension. “Paranormal investigation is less about what’s out there than what’s right here in front of us,” he writes.
